Stock Market Today: Apple outlook tests Wall Street rally with jobs data in focus
U.S. stocks are on pace for their best week of the year Friday, but a muted Apple outlook is testing bulls and a crucial October jobs report looms before the opening bell.
U.S. equity futures nudged lower Friday as a disappointing set of fourth quarter earnings from Apple AAPL looks set to snuff out the strongest Wall Street rally of the year heading into a key reading of October job growth from the Labor Department.
Apple topped Street forecasts for both its top and bottom lines, but notched its fourth consecutive quarterly revenue decline and hinted at holiday quarter sales growth that would largely flat to last year's levels.
The muted outlook has tech stocks in the red Friday, with the S&P 500 also slipping lower even as the benchmark heads to its strongest weekly gain of the year, powered in large part by a huge Treasury bond market rally that has loped around 20 basis points from 10-year note yields over the past three days.
A smaller-than-expected fourth quarter borrowing tally from the Treasury, fading manufacturing activity and falling wage indicators in a series of employment data releases have helped sparked the bond market rally, which began late Wednesday after the Federal Reserve held its key policy rate steady for a second consecutive meeting and indicated that inflation risks were 'balanced' heading into the final months of the year.
Benchmark 10-year Treasuries were little-changed at 4.672% in overnight dealing, while 2-year notes bumped 2 basis points higher to 5.004%, head of today's October employment report, which is expected to show the economy added a solid, but slowing, 180,000 new jobs with wages easing to around 4% on an annual basis.
Oil prices were also largely flat in the overnight session, and on pace for another weekly decline, as the supply premium linked to Israel's war with Hamas faded and investors focused on weakening demand from China amid its post-Covid recovery struggles and rising recession risks in Europe.
Brent crude contracts for January delivery, the global pricing benchmark, were last seen trading 1 cent lower on the session at $88.65 per barrel while WTI contracts for December, which are tightly-linked to U.S. gasoline prices, were marked 16 cents higher at $82.62 per barrel.
Heading into the start of Friday trading on Wall Street, futures contacts tied to the S&P 500 are priced of a 6 point opening bell decline while those linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average are indicating a modest 1 point pullback.
Apple's 3.3% slump has the tech-focused Nasdaq looking a larger 60 decline at the opening bell.
In overseas markets, the MSCI World Index, the broadest measure of global stocks, in one pace for a 4.3% weekly gain, its best since November of last year, with Europe's Stoxx 600 rising 0.21% on the session in early Frankfurt trading.
Overnight in Asia, the region-wide MSCI ex-Japan benchmark added 0.66% into the close of trading, helped in part by a private reading of services growth in China, the world's second-largest economy, that showed a modest uptick in October activity.
Japan's Nikkei 225, meanwhile, was closed for its annual Culture Day holiday in Tokyo.
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